


Of Planting Seeds and Carving Stone

by Bythia



Series: Just Write: Trope-Bingo 2020 [1]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Cabbage patch babies, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26128054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bythia/pseuds/Bythia
Summary: At the beginning of the second spring after they claimed back Erebor, Bilbo and Thorin talk about their future and the different ways in which Hobbits and Dwarrows create children.
Relationships: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield
Series: Just Write: Trope-Bingo 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1897216
Comments: 5
Kudos: 184
Collections: Just Write! Trope Bingo





	Of Planting Seeds and Carving Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Über das Pflanzen von Saat und das Schnitzen von Stein](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27675242) by [Bythia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bythia/pseuds/Bythia)



> This is my frist entry for the Trope-Bingo on the Just Write Server on Discord. My frist Bingo in fandom ever and I dove into it head first!
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** I don't own any of the characters or anything of this world. I just borrowed them to play a little bit, and I don't make money with the stories I borrowed them for. But the words are mine, so please don't copy them to use them as your own.  
> Have fun,  
> Bythia

Bilbo stood in a small alcove, that was caved in the outside of the mountain and could only be reached through a secret passage starting in the suits of the King under the Mountain. The only one who knew how to find him here was Thorin and Bilbo often came here when he needed time to himself. He had decided to stay in Erebor with Thorin after their quest, more than a year ago. But to live in a mountain full of rambunctious dwarrows was still so different from the life he had lived in the Shire that it could get overwhelming.

Though this time Bilbo was not here because he was searching for a little bit of quiet, but to look over the fast area surrounding the mountain, in which he could already feel the beginnings of the spring. Last year the land surrounding the Lonely Mountain had been a wasteland, but Bilbo had called for help from the Shire. And even so only a few dozen Tucks had followed his call (and brought all his belongings with them at the same time), the work of those few Hobbits had done wonders for the land.

Winter was still clutching desperately on the land, but for a Hobbit, the excited vibrations of the earth in expectation of spring was already perceptible. Bilbo was excited to see the results of the hard work that he and his kin had put into this land in the last year. The other Hobbits would leave when summer came, to return to their lives in the shire, except for two young couples who had decided to stay and build their smials and lives at the side of the mountain.

As strong arms enclosed him from behind, Bilbo leaned back with a sigh, burying himself in the embrace of his dwarrow. “Spring is coming soon.”

Thorin hummed. “I’m not looking forward to having you out of the mountain so often again.”

“You’ll learn to live with it.” Bilbo chuckled. “Really, I’m not made to stay in a mountain all year round! I need the earth under my toes and the garden as much as you need the forges and the stone surrounding you.”

“Will you accept a guard at least?”

Bilbo sighed. “If you can find me dwarrows who know how to help me at least a little bit. I wouldn’t want them to be bored while watching me garden and helping the man of Dale in the fields.”

He found Thorin’s worries about his safety outside of the mountain ridiculous, but he had learned in the last year to accept them. Even so, Thorin was overjoyed to have his home back, he still felt not safe here and Bilbo could not deny that he was the most vulnerable member of their company. Thorin felt especially protective of all of them, and Bilbo was not the only one who had at times been burdened with a bodyguard.

“You still have that?” Thorin asked.

Bilbo looked down at the acorn that he had rolled between his fingers since he had stepped out here. There was more to it than Thorin knew, but Bilbo still did not know how to approach that subject with his lover. It was a secret of the Hobbits, but he desperately wanted to share it with Thorin.

“Will you plant it?”

Bilbo shook his head smiling. “It will be many years before we’ll be ready to plant this seed. We’ll need to create a garden first, one that we both will care for and cherish.”

“Why would we need a garden to plant an oak tree?” Thorin's voice was full of the confusion that Bilbo had expected.

“Because what will grow out of this acorn won’t be any kind of tree”, Bilbo replied snickering.

Thorin sighed. “You are speaking in riddles, again!”

Bilbo closed his fingers around the acorn, which quivered with life against his palm. He turned halfway, so he could look up into the face of his lover without breaking his embrace. “There are two ways for Hobbits to create a new life. Our woman can, of course, bear a child under their hearts, but it is also possible for any two Hobbits to create a special kind of seed out of any kind of plant seeds. This seed is planted in a garden, that has to be taken care of by both parents, and the child will grow in the roots of the plant growing out of it.”

Thorin frowned. “Any two Hobbits?”

Bilbo shrugged. “Hobbits don’t get much out of the Shire, as you have surely noticed. I’m probably the first Hobbit to find the love of their life in another race. It does seem that only one of the parents has to be a Hobbit.”

“But when did this happen?” Thorin asked confused.

Bilbo raised a brow. “What do you think? - Those fairy tales your people started to tell about our unconquerable love destroying the curse on the Arcenstone may be nice and I won’t publicly deny it, but what happened in those minutes was another kind of magic altogether.”

No Hobbit would ever dare to claim that the creation of an earthborn child was magic. If one asked any Hobbit, they would claim to not possess any magic at all. But Bilbo had never thought of this process as anything other than magic and the minutes in which they had created this seed had only confirmed it to him.

“It may have been our mutual love for each other that broke you out of your gold sickness, but I’m convinced that it was us making a simple acorn into a seed – unintended as it may have been – that broke the curse on the Arcenstone. Because this kind of dark and detestable magic could not stand against the blessing Lady Yavanna gave my kind.”

Bilbo thought that the Lady Yavanna may have had even more of a hand in it because he had never heard about a seed being created when it was not a deliberate act from both parents. It could not have been a deliberate act at Thorin’s part, because he had not even known about the possibility, and Bilbo had not thought about seeds until the Arcenstone in his pocket had audibly cracked at the same time as he had felt the life surge through the acorn in his hands.

Thorin raised his hand to close his own fingers around Bilbo’s fist and press their joined hands against his chest. “This little thing is holding the life of our child in it?”

Bilbo smiled hesitantly. “Yes.” He had expected denial or protest from the dwarrow about this foreign concept of conceiving a child, but he could see nothing of that sort in Thorin's face, only wonder and excitement. “But it will still take a lot of work to grow a child out of it. And a lot of preparation before we could even start.”

“How much time do we have before we need to plant this seed?” Thorin asked.

Bilbo blinked. “As much as we need. It won’t go back to an acorn, the life in this seed won’t fade. This seed will prevail as long as both of us are alive.”

Thorin exhaled sharply. “Good. We’ll need to have a stable community here before we can bring any children into our life. I helped to raise Fili and Kili in poverty because my sister and her husband didn’t want to wait, but I won’t subject another little one to such a childhood!”

Bilbo nodded dumbfounded. It was less the possible poor circumstances for the childhood of their son or daughter that would let him protest the planting of their seed right away, and more the time they would need to invest in growing their earthborn child because, with the situation as it was currently, they would not have enough time.

But Thorin’s easy acceptance was also surprising for another reason. There was not one spec of discomfort to be seen in the dwarrow about the idea of a child between them. Bilbo had often dreamed about having a child with Thorin in the last year, but he had never dared to ask the dwarrow of his opinion for fear of rejection.

“I had expected more scepticism from you,” Bilbo confessed slowly.

Thorin frowned. “Because I didn’t notice what we had done?”

Bilbo snickered. “No, I could hardly expect you to notice something you had no idea of. Because of growing a child in the earth, instead of a female bearing it. There is more than one reason that Hobbits don’t share this information with outsiders.”

“There has never been a female dwarrow that was able to bear a child as elves and humans do,” Thorin said quietly. “For me, to grow a child in the roots of a plant is much less foreign than to grow a child inside a body of anyone.”

Bilbo blinked. “How do you create a child?”

“We carve them out of stone. It is the same way as the first of our kind were created by Mahal,” Thorin explained. “There are very few females amongst us and none of them has ever fallen pregnant. Even so, our males can impregnate woman, as Kili and his thrice-damned elf have just proven.”

Bilbo snickered in the face of Thorin’s ire. “You’ll have to get used to Tauriel being part of your family!”

Thorin snorted. “I will never be convinced that she won’t abandon Kili someday and break his heart. That is the way of elves with mortals. But I’ll stand with my nephew, should that happen during my lifetime. - And it is our family, not only mine, isn’t it?”

“I would love that.” Bilbo cocked his head. “Although, we have not made any official announcement despite sharing your chambers since they were inhabitable again. How does that work for dwarrows?”

Thorin laughed. “You think the incident you called a fairy tale earlier is not announcement enough?”

Bilbo huffed. “You should know that any respectable Hobbit would expect more of a courting period than one flimsy chain mail!”

“I was reliable informed that you are anything but respectable since the day you followed us out of your Shire in such a hurry, that you forgot half the things you thought necessary.”

“I was very respectable before you came along!” Bilbo insisted.

“I can’t even regret dragging you away from this life,” Thorin muttered.

“And I’ll never regret following you.”

There had been moments during their journey and at the end of it when he had thought that he did regret it. But this tiny little moment, in which they had managed to break the curse of the Arkenstone that had weighed down on the line of Durin for generations, had changed so much for Bilbo.

Bilbo closed his eyes with a sigh as Thorin kissed him. As they had reached Erebor, he had not even been sure if he could call Thorin a friend, even so, he had been very aware that he would like to call the dwarrow much more than just his friend. He still wondered how they had managed to make the acorn into a seed, with their relationship as strained as it had been at the time.

Thorin leaned his forehead against Bilbo’s. “What do we need to grow our child?”

“A garden, as I said,” Bilbo replied. “A flourishing garden and both of us need to work in it for a couple of hours every day. The child will need a lot of care, as long as it resides in the roots. And it could take anything between three to five years for them to come out of the earth. - We need to be sure that we can dedicate so much time to them before we plant the seed.”

“I know nothing about gardening,” Thorin muttered.

Bilbo smiled assuring. “I’ll teach you.”

“I often dream about carving a child with you,” Thorin confessed. “In a couple of years, when everything has settled down a little bit. But I had no idea how to bring this up. We have still so much to learn about each other.” He sighed deeply. “But I’m not sure if it will work with the other parent not a dwarrow. Because you don’t have the same sense of the stones that I have. How will you be able to sense, which rock is housing our child, or how our child is curled up in it, so that we know what of the stone to chip away as to free our child out of it?”

“We’ll just have to try,” Bilbo replied smiling. “It worked with my way, why shouldn’t it work with your way, too? - How does it work to carve a child?”

Thorin frowned. “I … am not sure, if I’m able to put it in words. It is the knowledge that every dwarrow is born with and we only speak with our partner about it. We will search our home, and with that, I mean all of Erebor, for a part of the stone in which we will sense our child. We will cut a big block of stone around that area and bring it into the nursery we’ll have prepared. We’ll study the stone for weeks or month and draw out the position of our child in it until we know exactly what part of it is just the cradle and what is the child. Then we’ll start to cut away the cradle until we have carved out our child. During the whole process of the carving, one of us will be with our child at all times, and when we have carved away the cradle we will stay with it and our family will gather outside the nursery for the hours it will take our child to awake from the stone.”

“So, I should learn to work with stone before we go and search for a child.”

Thorin laughed. “That is probably advisable. - Do you have already a place in mind for our garden?”

Bilbo sighed deeply. “That is actually a problem. Normally we choose a place right behind our smial, protected from the path in front of it and therefore not easily seen by those passing by, but still easily reachable at every time for us. I couldn’t help myself last year to look around while we worked outside the mountain last year, but I didn’t see a place that I felt would be … safe and near enough.”

“It should be a place, that aside from us only close family can reach?”

“Yes.” Bilbo shrugged.

Thorin turned his head to the left side of the alcove. “When I was a child I would use this place as a starting point to explore the outside of the mountain. If I remember correctly, there is a plateau not too far above us. We can create a staircase and create a garden there.”

“How big is it?”

“Two times as big as the plateau by the hidden door we used to get into the mountain.” Thorin cocked his head. “Is that too small?”

Bilbo frowned, trying to remember the dimensions of that plateau. He had not been there since the death of the dragon. “I don’t know, but probably not.”

He stepped out of Thorins embrace, put the acorn it the pocket of his trousers and leaned over the balustrade of the alcove to look at the side of the mountain. They were on the south-east side with the lake and Dale in view to their right. The mountain flank was not as rocky here as it was around the gate to Erebor, and there grew even a few trees on it.

“Careful!” Thorin grabbed Bilbo by his sides and drew him back.

“I know how to not fall, you know!” Bilbo groused out laughing. “There are soil and dirt here, that’s good. It wouldn’t do to have to bring masses of earth through the whole mountain! Do you think we can climb to the plateau sometime? Better to take a look at it before you put all the work into creating a staircase.”

Thorin huffed. “I’ll take Fili and Kili and install a ladder for you. Your feet are not made for climbing a mountainside up and down! I don’t need a repeat of your little fall in the misty mountains.”

“That was not my fault! There won’t be any stone giants here fighting against each other!”

“That was the first time I started to recognize my growing affection for you,” Thorin muttered. “I still have nightmares of it.”

Bilbo huffed. “Ha! Wouldn’t have thought that with your reaction about it!” He turned to look up at Thorin. “So, are we really doing this? Planing for creating children, I mean. Preparing for it, so that we’ll be able to start the process as soon as Erebor as a kingdom is back on an even keel?”

Smiling, Thorin cupped Bilbo’s face with his hands. “We are. I can’t wait to have one or two little ones running around this mountain, who will have your nose and eyes and my hair.”

Bilbo grinned. “One or two? You know, for Hobbits even four or five children is considered a small number. I’m pretty much the only single child in the whole Shire in the last few generations!”

Thorin looked at him wide-eyed. “Will there grow more than one child out of our acorn?”

“Maybe two, if we are lucky, but no more.” Bilbo chuckled. “Most young families plant three or four seeds at the same time and the children seem to sense when its a good time to crawl out of the earth in respect to the age of their siblings.”

“To have as much as three children is a wonder for dwarrows! Because it’s not easy to find a child in the stones.” Thorin swallowed visibly.

Bilbo smiled softly. “Let’s just see what the future will hold for us. Let us plant our garden and bring your kingdom back to a place, where we don’t have to worry about food supplies in the winter and the housing for the caravans that are still to arrive. We can talk about the number of our children when we have created a secure home for them.”

“Our kingdom.” Thorin drew him into a kiss before Bilbo could protest. “You are my consort and you have been so since we broke the Arcenstone, no dwarrow in this mountain would ever doubt it. You’ll have to tell me about the courting traditions of your folk, so we can follow them, too.”

Bilbo chuckled. “I agree to your terms.”

If nothing else it would be amusing to watch the dwarrows reaction about a Hobbit courting. Bilbo himself had never put much value into the traditions of his kin in this aspect, and he had started to suspect that part of him had known from the beginning that he would find this part of his life outside of the Shire.

Bilbo closed his fingers carefully around the small braid in Thorin’s beard that was steadily growing since they had taken back Erebor. It was the braid that Thorin had thought him to make and Bilbo knew that for the dwarrows it was a symbol of their relationship. He wore a very similar one on the side of his head, that Thorin re-braided every morning.

While his fingers played softly with the braid, he said, “You started with the end of it, because the last part in courting a Hobbit is for the partner of the more prominent family to build a home for their spouse and you already did that!”

  
  


** The End **

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Fill for the "Inexplicable Babies" square of my Bingo Card.


End file.
